Master of the Revels

by Nicole Galland

  “I see you better than you can see me,” she said. “After hours in this room even the starlight will make me blink.”

  “That is helpful, you can navigate us around the hazards.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Giovanni is taking you safely away from the men of this house. He will take you to a place where there are no men at all.”

  “Is there such a place?” she demanded in amazement.

  I clutched her hand more tightly and tried not to think about what I was actually touching. “First we get away from here and then I will tell you more.”

  “A place with no men?” she insisted.

  I did not want to tell her about the convent. A Muslim girl of this era, even one of Turkic rather than Arabic ancestry, would know the stories of the Crusades. She would have heard how, for more than one hundred years, Christians came out of the west, wave after wave of them, and, with no provocation other than their own religious zealotry and material greed, slaughtered untold thousands of Muslims—not just men, but women and children—all in the name of Jesus Christ. If she knew she was going to a house full of women who had devoted their lives to this same Jesus Christ, she would be too petrified with fear to move.

  “We are very rushed,” I said, instead of answering her. “Since you can see in this darkness, direct us out of here and put us on the path that goes downhill. We will meet the wagon driver just out of sight from here. I will explain the rest of it when we are safely away.”

  Still holding my hand, she brushed past me and out the door. The stench grew worse as she passed by, and it was all I could do not to retch. I followed her, without releasing our grip, past the stalls and back into the feed-room. Here she paused. “That way,” I whispered, pushing our joined hands to the left.

  She crossed carefully to the outer door and opened it into the courtyard, bright in the cold moonlight. We paused a moment to observe what lay ahead. The amber light was still flickering out of the ground-floor windows. And now there was a dim candle glow from one upstairs window. Agnola had stopped flirting with her husband and gone upstairs to request that her cousin help them with their long-term financial planning by raping the teenager they had just purchased.

  We had to cross through the garden, past the kitchen wing, and down to the zodiacally enhanced drive before Piero came downstairs.

  There was another problem, though, which I knew about from the first Strand: the stink of Dana. It would make us easy to track, and not even Giovanni would be willing to endure it for long. There were plenty of streams about in this hilly area—the estate was built on a slope to take advantage of water that must be running somewhere nearby—but no guarantee of finding one before the wagon arrived. She would have to bathe in the fountain.

  The basin was about the height of my sternum, which was nearly to the neck for Dana. It sat fastened onto statuary of satyrs and nymphs, so there were arms and legs and billowing hair for her to use to climb up, but it was awkward going as she made her way up and over into the basin.

  I dipped my hand into the basin to wash her dirt off my fingers. The water was frigid and she gasped as her foot slid into the basin. “Too cold,” she protested.

  “Too bad,” I said. “Be quick.”

  The fountain’s water pressure was very low, but there was enough gurgling and babbling that it should hide the noise we made. Shivering almost to spasms, Dana knelt so that the water bubbled down over her face and hands, briskly rubbed herself to get the filth off, and then tried to dry everything on a tattered edge of her sopping shift. When she realized the futility, she slapped her hand to the side of her head in self-criticism, then wrung out the shift and tried again.

  It was enough of an improvement for her to ride in the wagon, but not enough to be welcomed indoors anywhere.

  Just as she held out her hands for one final rinse, the fountain stopped burbling completely. The underground air-pressure basin must have been filling up with water, because the water was barely pushing out of the spout. I did not know when or how quickly the owners would notice or care about this. It would take some labor to restart it, so it was unlikely to happen tonight. But the fountain was the only thing out here making enough noise to hide our actions. Dana pulled away from the fountain when it stopped working, as if it were a conscious entity.

  “Come,” I whispered, gesturing.

  Still shaking madly from the cold, she took my hand and began to clamber out of the basin, leaning heavily on me. It would be harder to get out because the fountain was wider than its base, and she could not see where to place her feet—she had to push each one into the darkness and feel around with her toes for purchase. She landed one wet foot on a satyr’s head.

  As she shifted her weight to the ball of that foot, she slipped and grabbed me to steady her. It happened fast, I was not expecting it, and instead of my preventing her fall, we both fell, hard and noisily, onto the stones surrounding the fountain base. We froze. We paused to listen. Silence. I rose quickly and helped her up.

  From the center wing, voices sounded suddenly: two men laughing. Dana made a quiet frightened sound, then silenced herself. I gestured her to move with me behind a topiary horse. We might be able to reach the edge of the garden entirely under cover of garden embellishments.

  I motioned to the statue of an eagle, and she took a step in that direction. The door of the main wing opened suddenly; a short man holding a torch and a steaming-hot bucket stepped out into the yard. Behind him, a well-dressed woman. This must be Agnola. Dana saw her and leapt back into the shadows, bumping into me and almost knocking me over.

  Agnola had not seen her. She and the servant began to cross toward the stable door so that she could give her new piece of property a decent bath. We had to be gone before she reached the stable. The night air was completely still; if we so much as breathed too heavily she or the servant would hear.

  Halfway to the barn, she sighed with annoyance, told the servant to wait for her, and walked quickly back into the house. The servant looked bored and distracted in the torchlight, so I risked moving on. I nudged Dana, who tensed but then tiptoed out from behind the horse and made for the eagle statue. I followed closely enough that we might have passed as one single creature moving through the moonlight.

  We reached the eagle, and Dana breathed deeply to make up for holding her breath for the past minute. I pointed to an ogre statue at the corner of the garden. We hustled to it and nestled in its shadow.

  There was a gap of about twenty feet between the edge of the garden and the corner of the kitchen wing. It was a wide-open space that we had to get past, but once we were beyond the kitchen, that wing would block us from the rest of the building. That twenty-foot space yawned ahead of us like a chasm.

  “Go,” I whispered in Dana’s ear. “Before she comes back out.”

  Dana nodded and began to race across the open space. I followed.

  We hadn’t noticed in the dim light that the gravel here was neither pebbles nor pavement, but rocks about half the size of my fist, perhaps intended for drainage. It is difficult to walk on such stones and impossible to cross them silently. Stones rubbed and knocked together under our uncertain footing. And Agnola had just stepped back outside. Watching her over my shoulder as I scrambled, I saw her tense as she began to turn in our direction.

  I reached down, grabbed a stone, and chucked it as hard as I possibly could far back into the courtyard. I am no athlete, so I will not hazard a guess where my wild throw went, but it banged off something a good ways behind us.

  “Matteo!” called Agnola, opening the door again. “Matteo, come out here! Something is happening in the garden!”

  “Keep going,” I whispered.

  We ran. Down the hill, past the Scorpion, the Virgin, the Lion. When we reached the road, we began to run north toward the bend in the road DOer Angelo had described, where we were to meet the wagon driver. We needed him to be there already, because the trio would realize any moment now that t
hey had lost their purchase.

  There was no wagon yet. I found the tree that DOer Angelo used to mark time: once the moon appeared to be resting in the crotch of it, that was when the wagon would appear. We were much too early.

  I whispered to Dana that this was where we must wait. Up the hill, we could hear their concerned voices trying to determine what the sound had been, where it had come from. One of the men ran to the top of the drive and peered down toward the road, but he could not see us in the darkness. This would be a terrible time for a wagon to arrive.

  After staring for a moment, he made a broad gesture of dismissal and ran back toward the house, where the other two were directing the servant to light more torches so they could sweep the courtyard. They considered themselves the victims of something yet unknown, but it did not occur to them to associate the noise with Dana.

  I turned back to her. “Take this off,” I said, tugging at what remained of her shapeless garment. In the moonlight, she looked alarmed. “It is too wet and filthy for travel. You’ll catch a chill. I will give you my clothes, and I will take that.”

  She blinked in confusion a moment and then made an expression that was almost sheepish. “I have become so used to the stink that I forget others are not,” she said. “It was better than the alternative. It kept them from touching me.”

  “It was clever of you,” I said, unlacing my bodice as fast as my fingers would work. “But now, come, we must make you presentable. Undress.”

  I gave her the bodice and skirt and also the wimple, keeping only the under-shift for myself. I laced up the bodice loosely. There was nothing I could do about her matted hair. The nuns would have to cut it off.

  I had left the extra rosemary twig in the wimple and handed it to her now, once she was dressed. “You might—” I began, but she held up her hand, eyes wide, and pointed down the road. A horse was approaching at a gallop. A horse, not a wagon. Not Giovanni. Somebody who would see us, hail us, and draw attention to us. Dana grabbed my hand and pulled me toward a tree. We would never both fit behind it.

  “You go there, I’ll go to the other side,” I whispered.

  “No,” she said anxiously, holding my hand harder.

  “Go,” I said, and shoved her away from me. I ran across the road, which was the shadowy side because of the angle of the moon. I saw what I thought were two bushes beside each other, but when I tried to press between them I realized they were rocks. I tried to move behind them, but they were flush with the rise of the hill.

  The horse pulled up sharply on the road. I considered my options and stepped out into the roadway where the moon would strike me in my state of relative undress. If I could not get away, I could at least distract until the wagon arrived. Only, I didn’t know what to do about the men. The man on the horse spoke, but I ignored him because I was listening to Agnola say, “No, I didn’t check because I know the sound was something outside—” And then one of the men began to talk over her.

  “I said, the moon is so round it is almost square,” said the figure on the horse. He sounded nervous.

  I gasped with relief. That was the code phrase DOer Angelo had given me. “My favorite constellations are triangles,” I replied.

  “The head of Leo,” he said.

  “The tail of Scorpio,” I said, gesturing madly for Dana. “How wise of you to come just on the horse.” And switching to Tartar: “Dana, it’s him! Come!”

  The voices up the hill began to squabble with each other. I crossed to the far side of the road, grabbed Dana by the arm, and pulled her back toward the horse. In this final moment before safety she seemed suddenly overwhelmed. I clapped my hand on her arm. “Use me as a mounting block,” I said, moving closer to the horse.

  “Giovanni!” she gasped, as if she could not believe it was really him. She almost sounded like an ordinary teenage girl. He nodded and gestured to the pillion seat behind his saddle. I bent over and indicated she was to climb up on me. She scrambled up, and I felt her weight lift from me as Giovanni settled her behind him.

  Immediately he galloped off in the direction of the city. Dana was free. An unexpected elation bubbled up through me. But instantly I took that energy and used it to scream bloody murder as I began to sprint up the drive back to the house. I would have to distract the family from noticing Dana’s absence for at least an hour. Finally this DEDE required some of the actual skills that DODO hired me for!

  My long hair bounced loosely over the shift. I kept screaming. By the time I was up to the house, all of them—Matteo, Agnola, Piero, the servant—were at the edge of the garden peering down in the direction I approached from.

  “Who is that?” called out one voice.

  “Help! Help me!” I cried, and kept running. I was breathless by the time I reached them, and had gotten banged up enough falling down by the fountain that I looked passably like a woman in distress. A backstory I had prepared on my own poured out of me: I had been kidnapped from my wealthy husband’s villa in Milan, trussed up and stuck in a chest, carried for days to some unknown land, then ravished and left for dead on the side of the road. They listened to me, wide-eyed in amazement. I made sure to display qualities that would allow me to pass as aristocracy: head tipped at a certain angle, bend of wrists and position of fingers, certain turns of phrase that I knew (not in preparation for this DTAP but from a different one set slightly later in Milan). As they listened, gaping, I begged for shelter, for water, for wine. I emphasized how generous and grateful my husband would be for their helping me. Believing my aristocratic affect, Agnola and Matteo quickly offered me the chief bed of the house, which I accepted as if it were my due (eyeing it as though it were down-market for my tastes). I was offered a full supper, which I turned down (with utterances of gratitude that successfully conveyed that I assumed their food would be inferior to what I was used to). What I really needed, I managed to convey, was company so that I would feel safe, until I fell asleep. I made it clear that I was used to being surrounded by my servants and attendants, and my trauma could only be assuaged by my receiving a great deal of attention. I caught exchanges between them: they would have to put off their repellent plans until tomorrow, when (they promised me) they would take me into the city in their most elegant conveyance (I responded to this news as if I assumed their conveyance would be insufficiently comfortable but I would make the best of it). I could also see that the cousin Piero—although he was not foolish enough to make a move on me—was aroused by my disheveled, helpless presentation. He was a nauseating lout.

  After a great deal of fuss, I managed to get myself bedded alone in the master bedchamber, telling them that, while I required constant company awake, I was a very light sleeper and could not brook even the sound of other people’s breathing when I slept. It is remarkable to me that these people did not think to question me overmuch. They were so hot to collect a reward of sheltering me that their greed blinded them to practical considerations. I am also, as my work record shows, very good at passing as high status.

  Once the household had settled into slumber, I slipped out and made my way back up the valley to Lucia, who chastised me for losing her dress, but Homed me nonetheless.

  The DEDE lasted approximately six hours, most of that time spent walking.

  —CYL

  Post by LTG Octavian K. Frink to Dr. Constantine Rudge on private ODIN channel

  DAY 1997 (16 JANUARY, YEAR 6)

  Good afternoon, Constantine—

  Since you suggested I keep an eye on the fourth-century Sicilian DTAP, just thought I’d give you a précis of the first-Strand DEDE report. In a nutshell, it was an unusually complex DEDE, yet completed with perfect success.

  As you may recall, this DEDE was calculated by the Chronotron as the best way to effect a (far-downstream) development of the fortunes of a certain ancient family (Sicilian, immigrating to Prussia) in the nineteenth century.

  Our DOer Arturo Quince (MacGyver/Closer class), as if by accident, overturned a cart laden with a pre
assembled floor mosaic. This was traveling from an urban workshop to a large family compound. (The preassembled bit was a common practice in remote areas.) The master designer, Hanno Gisgon, was a citizen of Carthage with a workshop in Marsala and was traveling with the cart to oversee the installation personally (which points to the status of the owner, one Marcus Livius Saturninus).

  The mosaic was broken apart when the cart overturned—that was the first part of DOer Quince’s DEDE. However, although the piece of art was ruined, the tesserae (i.e., the tiles) were undamaged. DOer Quince then accompanied the cart the rest of the way to the compound, where he offered to help “repair” the mosaic. He had befriended the master designer, Gisgon, en route, and now convinced Gisgon to change the design of the mosaic—that was the second part of the DEDE. What had originally been an image of the Nine Muses was refigured to depict astronomical imagery, which DOer Quince helped Gisgon to sketch. More important, DOer Quince coaxed Gisgon to fabricate some comets using a particular kind of tesserae made of brilliant yellow glass (even though floor mosaics are not usually made of glass), which would cause a spectacular visual effect when light hit the floor at an acute angle.

  The downstream effect: this artistic wonder makes the family an object of envied respect throughout the empire and in various ways shores up their fortunes; later generations of the family, in homage to their forefather’s mosaic, retain an institutional regard for all things astronomical, which is why they will offer to build the Royal Observatory on their Prussian estate in the nineteenth century.

  Once confident of his success at convincing designer Gisgon to make the changes, DOer Quince was Homed by a witch named Livia, whom Roger Blevins had already ascertained was at the site.

  I realize this is an unusually proactive DEDE, i.e., it’s unlike our usual MO of doing something relatively minute, like moving a bench or blowing out a candle, etc. But Gráinne was very clear this was the best way to go about things, and the Chronotron currently calculates that six more Strands will ensure this alteration “takes” in the multiverse.